The streets are quieter in Kashechewan First Nation.
Some children are still playing hockey outside on a snow-packed road, but that would have been more common just three weeks earlier.
About half of the 2,300 people living in the remote fly-in community in northern Ontario have already left for cities to the south — including Timmins, Ont., Kingston and Niagara Falls — as part of evacuation efforts that began earlier this month.
It’s all because of concerns over the aging and damaged water-treatment plant in the Cree First Nation.
On Jan. 4, Chief Hosea Wesley declared a state of emergency. People were told not to drink the water and the plant effectively shut off the taps providing it to their homes.
Technicians with Northern Waterworks were brought in to repair the damage and worked to get the water running again. But they’re awaiting test results from a lab in North Bay for health authorities to determine if the water is safe to drink.
(Jimmy Chabot/Radio-Canada)
Adrian Sackaney still doesn’t trust the local water supply.
He goes to the nearby Albany River, which flows into James Bay, to collect large chunks of ice
Every day, Sackaney hauls that ice to his home with a snowmobile so it can be put to use when it melts.
“I use that ice for my kids to take a bath,” Sackaney said. “It’s hard work to go get ice too … I don’t trust that water plant right now.”
While evacuations continue, Sackaney plans to stay behind.
“It’s not fun going out, staying in a hotel,” he said. “There’s six of us and we get cramped there.”
But his wife and children will likely join the others who are already boarding planes headed to other communities in the province.
Rita Wynne is among the hundreds of people who have chosen to leave.
She was waiting with her grandchildren at the small airport terminal for the next flight to Niagara Falls.
“It is stressful what’s happening, especially when you have kids and when they provide water to us in water bottles,” Wynne said.
“It’s not enough when there are families, like there’s a big family in one house.”
Wynne said there are 14 people, and several generations, in her family’s household.
She has never been to Niagara Falls before, but said staying in hotel rooms was preferable to not being able to trust the local water.
“I think there’s too much of that Band-Aid solution with the water plant because we’ve been having problems.”
What went wrong
Robert Lariviere, a consultant with Northern Waterworks, was brought in to assess the damage at Kashechewan’s water plant and help fix it.
Lariviere explained that pumps at the plant failed and became clogged. They had to be replaced.
“We found two [pumps] laying in the snowbank,” he said.
“They had previously failed at some point and they weren’t sent out for repair. They were just put off to the side, so they had no spare pumps.”
The sewer system also hadn’t been cleaned in years, he said.
“The other problem that happened is when the sewer backs up into the system, it loses all the debris and that’s built up in the pipes,” Lariviere said.
“When the system starts to drain out, all that debris flakes off, comes down the sewer, causes pumps to plug up.”
Those clogs led to a significant sewage backup at Kashechewan’s nursing station, which had to be evacuated and relocated to an elementary school across the street.
Lariviere said it’s not uncommon for equipment at water treatment plants to fail because the pumps run 24 hours a day.
“And not just in First Nations,” he said.
“I’ve seen municipal systems fail, too. Things break and budgets are tight. And sometimes you don’t always have the parts, especially with aging equipment.”
Lariviere said newer water treatment plants have redundancy built in — for example, extra pumps as backup —in case something goes wrong. But that wasn’t the case with Kashechewan’s older facility.
He had praise, though, for the four local operators who handle the day-to-day operations at the plant.
“They actually do a very good job,” Lariviere said. “They’ve got very detailed records … Water quality, for the most part, is very good.”
But he added that when operators leave the job or retire, training replacements can be an issue.
What comes next
Wesley has called on more support from both the federal and provincial governments to speed up evacuations and the work needed to ensure local water is safe to drink.
“I asked Canada to support Kashechewan, to support our children, to support our elders,” he said.
Over the long term, Wesley said his community, which is prone to flooding every spring, needs to be moved to higher ground.
He said longer-term investments in local infrastructure are more difficult to achieve with that constant risk.
Indigenous Services Canada spokesperson Eric Head said in an email to CBC News that on Dec. 4, the department approved around $8.4 million to undertake detailed planning studies for the relocation of the community.
“Indigenous Services Canada will continue to support Kashechewan First Nation in meeting the long-term needs of the community,” Head said.
